The one weapon that Putin is terrified of? Ridicule. And it’s exploding in his face

ACCORDING to the Kremlin, Britons are being whipped up into a ferment of ‘Russophobia’. Specifically, Moscow claims that the main reason for Theresa May’s dogged pursuit of the men who tried to murder the Russian defector Sergei Skripal in Salisbury is that the PM, too, is whipping up ‘ Russophobia’ to distract the public from the incompetence of her own government.

Let me reassure the Kremlin: the risk of the British becoming demented with fear of Russia — which is what Russophobia literally means — diminishes by the day.

For it is increasingly clear that the attempted assassination of Mr Skripal (a British subject) and his daughter Yulia with the nerve agent Novichok has been a litany of ineptitude and bungling from first to last.

But it is only with last week’s accidentally comic interview on RT (formerly Russia Today) with the two suspects that it is finally dawning on even the slowest learners: it is the British government — at least as manifested in its security services — which knows what it is doing, and the Russian military intelligence operation which is careless and incompetent to the point of farce.

And it is humour — the deadliest of all weapons in a propaganda war — that the British are now turning on Moscow, following the claims of the men, known as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, that they had gone to Salisbury on two successive days (having flown direct from Moscow and then immediately returned) purely in order to gaze at its cathedral’s ‘world-famous 123-metre spire’.

Comedy

Of which these supposed fans of the perpendicular Gothic style can show no personal photos (perhaps because the CCTV footage showed them walking from the city’s station in precisely the opposite direction towards Sergei Skripal’s home, which has no spire at all).

Or as one British Twitter account noted: ‘I’m just saying I wouldn’t be uninterested in a feature-length comedy about two cathedral-loving Russian gays whose dream holiday to Salisbury via Bow turns into a nightmare when they’re accused of carrying out a deadly nerve agent attack.’

There are plenty more where that came from. Some argue that the way this has descended into humour plays into the Kremlin’s hands by turning attempted state murder into a mere joke.

We should certainly not forget that a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, suffered a horrible death when she sprayed herself with the Novichok which the would-be assassins had contained in a fake Nina Ricci scent bottle and (astonishingly) discarded in a Salisbury park.

But these men — as is becoming increasingly clear — are agents of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency whose emblem is a scary-looking pair of giant bat wings encircling a globe.

It is a terrific blow to the mystique of such an organisation that its trained killers should become subjects of ridicule across the world.

Ah, say others, but their interview last week — licensed by President Putin — was designed to appeal not to an international audience but the Russian people.

In which case, why did they give their interview, dubbed in English, to RT, which like the BBC’s World Service is a news channel specifically directed at an international, not a domestic audience?

I felt almost sorry for the editor-in-chief of RT, Margarita Simonyan, who was called upon to interview the musclebound pair of thugs masquerading as connoisseurs of English mediaeval church architecture. Even she could barely hide her incredulity, and after the interview said that although the men had agreed to send her images of their visit to the cathedral, ‘I’m still waiting’. For some reason, she forgot to ask them about the Novichok trace found in their London hotel room.

In fact, the broadcast was a disaster for RT, given that its purpose (not least over the Skripal affair) was to persuade its viewers to question the credibility of Western governments rather than the Kremlin.

An analysis led by the University of Manchester’s Reframing Russia project showed a dramatic change in the make-up of online comments on the RT website following last week’s events.

On one earlier RT video about the affair, 73 per cent of comments posted suggested the whole business was some sort of western conspiracy, with claims such as ‘it is more likely the CIA poisoned the Skripals to place blame on Russia’.

Idiots

Almost half the comments were critical of Britain and its allies — and a mere four comments were critical of Russia, Putin or RT’s own claims. And on another RT video about the Salisbury poisoning, 95 per cent of the comments were critical of Britain.

But last week’s sensational interview with the supposed art-lovers ‘Petrov’ and ‘Boshirov’ marked an abrupt change.

As the Reframing Russia team noted: ‘The top 100 liked comments included many from viewers who felt the suspects’ stories were implausible’ — You don’t say! — and just 16 per cent of the comments were critical of Britain.

One example suffices: ‘Until today I perceived the Skripal story as Britain’s provocation. But once I saw these two idiots, my view has been shaken.’ In other words, RT viewers in their droves were suddenly realising they were being taken for fools. And if it is domestic viewers that Putin is most concerned with, they’re running away from the Kremlin line, too.

As the Moscow-based Levada polling group revealed, since March there has been a 15 per cent swing away from the heavily state- controlled TV and radio towards independent providers (such as on social media), when the Russian people are asked where they turn to find out what is going on.

But don’t think it had all been going the Kremlin’s way up until now.

Most obviously, so obvious it is rarely pointed out, the Salisbury operation was a failure. Sergei and Yulia Skripal survived the attack and live to tell the tale.

Also, and clearly unexpected by the Kremlin, the rest of the Western world — including the supposed admirer of Putin, Donald Trump — rallied round the UK and hundreds of Russian ‘diplomats’ were kicked out.

Now Washington, persuaded that Moscow has broken the Chemical Weapons Convention, is about to launch a further set of sanctions, damaging the already fragile Russian economy.

Pygmy

This is the one big thing to bear in mind: Russia may loom large in physical terms but it is a relative economic pygmy. Its economy is smaller than Italy’s on at least one internationally accepted measure, and less than half the size of the UK’s.

Last year, the Carnegie Moscow Center reported, devastatingly: ‘A substantial part of Russia’s production capacity is both technologically and functionally obsolete . . .’ and forecast this would lead the country to ‘economic collapse’.

This hopelessness was hilariously manifested last month with the release by the Russian weapons company Kalashnikov of a military robot, dubbed ‘Igorek’ (little Igor). But Igorek was not so little: it was 13ft tall and weighed in at 4.5 tonnes. And it remained, on its debut display, totally immobile.

Last week, it emerged that the Soyuz MS- 09 spacecraft docked at the International Space Station had been losing oxygen (to the great risk of crew members) . . . because it had a hole in it.

Amazingly, Moscow had instructed the Russian crew members to fill the hole with a cloth covered with epoxy.

We should see the unfolding Skripal affair in the context of what happened on the Soyuz MS-09 and ‘Igorek’s’ launch.

This vast and proud nation is infested by idiocy at the top — an idiocy which licenses gangsterism as crude and inefficient as a spacecraft with a hole filled in with glue, or a robot that can’t move.

All this is, of course, a rich subject for humour. The Kremlin-paid media and its embassy in London have been pretty good at poking fun at the British over the Skripal business.

But this satire war is turning in our favour. And if there’s one thing that Putin can’t abide, it’s being laughed at.

Prepare for some toxic fall-out — but in Moscow, not Salisbury.